Traditional news sources have relied on editors in order to determine the significance and prominence of stories. An editor is a person who is generally in charge of and who determines the final content of a publication, such as a newspaper or magazine.
Traditional media sources such as newspaper, television and radio now coexist with non-traditional media sources, such as micro-blogs including Twitter™. The volume of documents may be particularly large for non-traditional media sources, such as micro-blogs. Since micro-blogs provide a means for laypeople to publish comments, the number of documents which are published on a micro-blog provider system (such as Twitter™) may be extremely large. That is, the large number of potential authors can result in a large number of documents being produced.
Similarly, due to the abundance of media sources, the quantity of stories produced has become quite large. Since stories may be initiated by any person who is able to publish to a blog or micro-blog, the volume of stories increases with the number of bloggers and micro-bloggers. For example, any user with a Twitter™ account may initiate a new story.
Due to the abundance of media sources and content produced by various media sources, determining the significance and prominence of stories may be a difficult or impossible task for a traditional editor. By way of example, this task may be particularly difficult for news aggregation systems and websites. News aggregation systems and websites may analyze content from various sources and may provide access to that content through a common portal. Since news aggregation systems and websites index content from many different sources, the number of stories and documents which are indexed by such systems and websites may be quite large.
Similar reference numerals are used in different figures to denote similar components.